Oriol Mitjà Villar

Since 2010, he has led the Lihir Medical Center (Papua New Guinea), a research team for the control and treatment of yaws, a chronic tropical disease, still neglected, that mainly affects children and that can cause severe bone deformation in the long term. term.

Their studies have demonstrated the efficacy of their treatments against yaws and, as a result of this evidence, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to launch a campaign that is expected to have eradicated the disease by 2020, so that it becomes in the second disease eradicated in the world after smallpox.

The award was presented in Barcelona.